taryneast comments on 2013 Survey Results - Less Wrong

74 Post author: Yvain 19 January 2014 02:51AM

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Comment author: MondSemmel 19 January 2014 12:59:07PM *  12 points [-]

Thanks for taking the time to conduct and then analyze this survey!

What surprised me:

  • Average IQ seemed insane to me. Thanks for dealing extensively with that objection.
  • Time online per week seems plausible from personal experience, but I didn't expect the average to be so high.
  • The overconfidence data hurts, but as someone pointed out in the comments, it's hard to ask a question which isn't misunderstood.

What disappointed me:

  • Even I was disappointed by the correlations between P(significant man-made global warming) vs. e.g. taxation/feminism/etc. Most other correlations were between values, but this one was between one's values and an empirical question. Truly Blue/Green. On the topic of politics in general, see below.
  • People, use spaced repetition! It's been studied academically and been shown to work brilliantly; it's really easy to incorporate in your daily life in comparison to most other LW material etc... Well, I'm comparatively disappointed with these numbers, though I assume they are still far higher than in most other communities.

And a comment at the end:

"We are doing terribly at avoiding Blue/Green politics, people."

Given that LW explicitly tries to exclude politics from discussion (and for reasons I find compelling), what makes you expect differently?

Incorporating LW debiasing techniques into daily life will necessarily be significantly harder than just reading the Sequences, and even those have only been read by a relatively small proportion of posters...

Comment author: taryneast 09 February 2014 05:14:13AM *  1 point [-]

"Time online per week seems plausible from personal experience, but I didn't expect the average to be so high."

I personally spend an average of 50 hours a week online.

That's because, by profession, I am a web-developer.

The percentage of LessWrong members in IT is clearly higher than that of the average population.

I postulate that the higher number of other IT geeks (who, like me, are also likely spending high numbers of hours online per week) is pushing up the average to a level that seems, to you, to be surprisingly high.